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Emotivism is no longer a view of ethics that has many supporters. Like subjectivism it teaches that there are no objective moral facts, and that therefore 'murder is wrong' can't be objectively true.
Emotivists teach that:
This means that the first half of the statement 'it was wrong to murder Fred' adds nothing to the non-moral information that Fred has been murdered.
Later emotivists added this idea to Emotivism:
In Emotivism a moral statement isn't literally a statement about the speaker's feelings on the topic, but expresses those feelings with emotive force.
When an emotivist says 'murder is wrong' it's like saying 'down with murder' or 'murder, yecch!' or just saying 'murder' while pulling a horrified face, or making a thumbs-down gesture at the same time as saying 'murder is wrong'.
At first sight this seems such a bizarre idea that you might wonder if anyone had ever seriously thought it. One of the great philosophers of the 20th century certainly did:
The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money,' I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that money.'
In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks.
The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker.
A J Ayer, Critique of Ethics and Theology (Chapter 6 of Language Truth and Logic)
The reasons why some philosophers thought this are technical - they thought that ethical statements could not be converted into statements that could be empirically tested, and thus failed the verifiability criterion of meaning - which meant that they were meaningless.
Emotivism pays close attention to the way in which people use language and acknowledges that a moral judgement expresses the attitude that a person takes on a particular issue. It's like shouting "hurray", or pulling a face and going "ugh".
That's why this theory is called Emotivism, because it's based on the emotive effect of moral language.
Later theories of Emotivism taught that it was about more than just an expression of emotion - the speaker is also trying to have an effect on the person they're talking to.
The American philosopher C. L. Stevenson said that the major use of ethical judgements...
...is not to indicate facts, but to create an influence. Instead of merely describing people's interests, they change or intensify them...
...For instance: When you tell a man that he oughtn't to steal, your object isn't merely to let him know that people disapprove of stealing. You are attempting, rather, to get him to disapprove of it. Your ethical judgment has a quasi-imperative force which, operating through suggestion, and intensified by your tone of voice, readily permits you to begin to influence, to modify, his interests...
Mind, 1937
So when people disagree about an ethical issue, Emotivism makes it clear that each is trying to persuade the other to adopt their attitude and follow their recommendations as to how to behave, rather than giving information that might be true or false.
This version of emotivism gets round one of subjectivism's biggest problems. Consider this example:
When one subjectivist says lying is bad, they're giving the information that they disapprove of lying. If another subjectivist says lying is good, they're giving the information that they approve of lying.
Since, according to the subjectivist view, both are reporting their own personal feelings, there isn't actually anything that they disagree about.
But since people do sincerely disagree about moral issues, there must be more going on than pure subjectivism allows, and this is included in Emotivism:
When an Emotivist says lying is bad they're giving the instruction "don't tell lies", while an Emotivist who says lying is good is giving the instruction "do tell lies" - and we can see that there is a clear disagreement between them.
Emotivism has become unpopular with philosophers because the theory that led the Emotivists to think that moral statements were meaningless has fallen from favour.
Less technically, if expressing moral judgements is really no more than expressing one's personal opinion there doesn't seem any useful basis for arguing about moral judgements.
In practical terms, Emotivism falls down because it isn't very satisfying. Even (most) philosophers think moral statements are more than just expressions of feeling.
And it's perfectly possible to imagine an ethical debate in which neither party has an emotion to express.
Non-philosophers also think there is more to ethics than just the expression of an attitude or an attempt to influence behaviour. They want a better explanation and foundation for shared standards of morality than Emotivism can provide.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/emotivism_1.shtml
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